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To Capitalist Folly, Town in Spain Offers Reply

MARINALEDA, SPAIN — Since they occupied the estate of a local aristocrat 20 years ago, the inhabitants of this Andalusian village and its fiery mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, have been synonymous with the struggle of Spain’s rural poor.

As the country grapples with soaring unemployment and a real estate bust, this Communist enclave, surrounded by sloping olive groves, is attracting fresh interest. Drawn by Marinaleda’s housing program and bustling farming cooperative, people from neighboring villages — and from as far afield as Madrid and Barcelona — have come here in search of jobs and homes, villagers and local officials say.

Mr. Sánchez, who this month celebrated three decades as mayor of the town of 2,700, says the crisis in global capitalism vindicates his radical Socialist vision.

“They all thought that the market was God, who made everything work with his invisible hand,” Mr. Sánchez, 53, said last week, seated in his office below a portrait of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “Before, it was a mortal sin to talk about the government having a role in the economy. Now, we see we have to put the economy at the service of man.”

While the rest of Spain gorged on cheap credit to buy overpriced homes, the people of Marinaleda were building their own houses, mortgage-free, under the town hall’s scheme, Mr. Sánchez said. When a villager loses his job, the cooperative hires him, he said, so nobody in the village wants for work — a bold claim in a region with 21 percent unemployment.

Vanessa Romero, who moved from Barcelona to Marinaleda in January with her family, said she was drawn by the promise of work and the municipal facilities. In November, she lost her job at a sugar factory and her husband was struggling to find construction work; now they each make about €1,100 a month working for the cooperative, about $1,450.

“If a town like this, with half the resources of other towns, or less, can provide work for people, why can’t other places do the same?” said Ms. Romero, whose parents were born in the village.

Critics say that Mr. Sánchez’s claims are exaggerated and that he has succeeded in doling out misery rather than creating wealth. By promoting low-productivity farm jobs, he has kept voters dependent on him for work and handouts, they say.

“This village has stagnated,” said Hipólito Aires, a Socialist councilor who works at the local gas station. He said the political atmosphere in Marinaleda was stifling and the mayor ostracized his opponents — a sentiment echoed by several villagers who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.

“Sánchez Gordillo criticized the local lords, but now he acts like them,” Mr. Aires said. “The biggest landowner in Marinaleda today is the mayor.”

After Mr. Sánchez won election in April 1979 as a representative of the United Workers’ Collective, a local farm workers’ organization, Marinaleda became a nucleus of leftist militancy. Over the years, the villagers have occupied farms, picketed government offices and held hunger strikes to demand work and land.

Photo

Sanchez Gordillo, the mayor of Marinaleda, at the town hall. Credit
Laura Leon for The New York Times

Their most prominent campaign culminated in 1991 with the regional government’s expropriating an estate from a local duke and leasing it to the village. The resulting cooperative, about 12 kilometers, or 6 miles, north of the village, grows labor-intensive crops like artichokes, hot peppers, broccoli and broad beans, as well as wheat.

“I wish our mayor would do something like this for us,” said Francisco Pradas from the nearby town of Écija, who was busily picking beans on a recent morning. The farm manager, José Martin, said demand for jobs from other villages had soared recently. “Around Ecija there’s nothing but sunflowers and wheat, crops that don’t need any manpower.”

On the edge of town lies the other jewel in Marinaleda’s Communist crown: a colony of neat, three-bedroom houses, built by their occupants on municipal land, with materials provided by the Andalusian government.

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Prospective owners must donate some 450 days of work to the building project, which is overseen by an architect and a foreman paid by the town hall. The program has built about 350 houses so far and plans to add 250 more in the next two years. Demand from residents of nearby towns rose so much over the past couple of years that the town hall now limits the program to people who have been resident for at least two years.

Mr. Sánchez’s populist bravado and idiosyncratic mode of government permeate life in this self-described “utopia for peace,” which has no municipal police force (a savings of €250,000 a year, officials say).

The mayor has a one-hour show every Saturday on Marinaleda’s television channel, when he reads his own poetry or talk politics. Every few weeks, the town hall announces a Red Sunday over a bullhorn; volunteers clean the streets or do odd jobs around the village.

Political murals and revolutionary slogans adorn the town’s whitewashed walls and several streets are named after left-wing Latin Americans.

Mr. Sánchez has embraced a plethora of causes ranging from genetically modified crops to the Sahrawi people’s struggle for self-determination in Western Sahara.

He has been jailed seven times and says he has survived two assassination attempts, one from a fascist agitator and the other from an enraged policeman.

“His problem is, he is a permanent revolutionary,” Mr. Aires said. “Half the people at his rallies don’t even know where Palestine is.”

Although Marinadela saw itself as a Communist oasis, it depended heavily on the regional and central governments. The materials for each house, for example, cost the regional government about €18,000.

Salvador Becera, an expert in anthropology at the Center for Andalusian Studies in Seville, said Mr. Sánchez had brought social equity to an uneducated, economically oppressed community. However, his vision for Marinaleda was anachronistic, he said, and the future of Andalusia lay not in the fields, but in industry and services.

“Right now, they can puff out their chests because the economy is in crisis,” Mr. Becera said. “But what if they had the chance to get rich? Then who would stay in this little paradise that Sánchez Gordillo has created?”